As businesses realize the efficiencies enabled by high-speed communications, in order to remain competitive, they are tasked with building high-speed networks and data centers that will allow them to take advantage of the rapid deployment of countless software-based applications and services entering the marketplace. One of the problems with building these networks is that they are based on standard packet technologies, such as Ethernet and IP. In a relatively short time, these networks have moved from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps backbones. Just as quickly, many networks are beginning to move to 10 Gbps, with designs for the next generation of Ethernet promising to deliver data transfer rates between 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps. This exponential swell in network performance is occurring with the anticipation that businesses will be able to provide the bandwidth necessary to support a growing list of IP applications and services having strict bandwidth performance requirements.
These Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks and data centers expose businesses to millions of packets of information per second, comprised of numerous protocols, applications and services. These data rates make it difficult for businesses to guarantee network and application performance, as well as manage, secure and control the overall network usage while protecting against threats and unacceptable practices using traditional network appliances due to mis-matched performance. One method of guaranteeing network and application performance is to scale network appliance (such as firewall, server load-balancers, etc.) performance in high bandwidth data centers. However, building a network that solves the bandwidth problem by scaling the network appliances often leads to over provisioned and energy inefficient designs.